This week’s mystery movie was the 1941 Columbia picture “Texas,” with William Holden, Glenn Ford, Claire Trevor, George Bancroft, Edgar Buchanan, Don Beddoe and Willard Robertson. Screenplay by Horace McCoy, Lewis Meltzer and Michael Blankfort, from a story by Michael Blankfort and Lewis Meltzer, photography by George Meehan, editing by William Lyon, art direction by Lionel Banks, musical direction by M.W. Stoloff, produced by Samuel Bischoff, directed by George Marshall.

“Texas” is available on DVD from Amazon.

Writing in the New York Times (Oct. 17, 1941), T.S. said:

Columbia, which built a cinematic monument in “Arizona” so heavy it wouldn’t budge, has taken a wiser course in “Texas,” which galloped into Lowe’s State yesterday in a large cloud of dust. For the producers have been content to forget pompous eulogies of the pioneer spirit and such similar nonsense, and make quite simply a carefree piece of hokum. Wild hokum it is, too, shuttling between unabashed slapstick and the most implausible sort of derring-do. Some of the sequences in fact might have been copied straight out of a 1922 Western. But call it what you will, “Texas” is for most of its length a fast and entertaining chase.

For Monday, we have a mystery gent. He is curious about such goings-on.

I am 80 years old and often when I see a face there is just a blank space where there should be a name. I stand corrected. It is Edgar Buchanan and our gal Friday is my love Claire Trevor in Texas.But you must admit both Burl and Edgar have memorable voices.

I’m with you. One of the first movies I ever saw in a theater was “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (apparently my parents opted not to get a sitter — and no, I did not understand it whatsoever) and since then my default for all rotund, bearded Southern villains was Burl Ives. Edgar Buchanan was a more recent (if you consider the 1960s “more recent”) discovery.